


Black and Red

by t0talcha0s



Category: BioShock
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Murder, Non-Graphic Violence, implied suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-02-08
Packaged: 2018-05-19 04:12:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5953165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/t0talcha0s/pseuds/t0talcha0s
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chief of Rapture police, known only as Sullivan, was a stalwart man and a tough bastard, but he did not know how to knit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Black and Red

Sullivan didn't know how to knit. This had never been a problem for him in the past, but now he thinks it to be a bit of a shame. He'd asked around, most people just shrugged him off, either not knowing how or not wanting to take the trouble to teach him. A particularly embarrassing moment came when he was at a dinner party thrown by a member of his squad. Sullivan approached the man's wife while she was in the kitchen, and the man, fearing Sullivan would make a move on her, surveyed their conversation. When Sullivan asked her to show him how to knit the officer walked in laughing and proclaimed, 

"Our chief's a bit of a dandy ain't he? What do you need to know to knit for?" Sullivan shrugged, he would rather his men think him a dandy then know the real reason. Sullivan was considered too strong to ever be affected by the nastier side of his job, he had tortured Timmy H, he had been there for the takeover of Fontaine's, he was Ryan's go-to guy to rough people up or deal with grift. He had killed plenty of bad people in his time, sure sometimes the screams of dying, spliced up lunatics ricocheted up his spine and made him shiver in bed at night, but generally he was perceived as infallible and lacking sentimentality. But that all came crashing down with that black and red blanket. 

The story behind the half-finished blanket wasn't one Sullivan cared to jabber on about, and wasn't allowed to by way of his business contract. He had done some shady, assassin-esque work for Ryan before, but the order to bump Anna Culpepper felt different. Culpepper wasn't a gangster, she'd never killed, she wasn't threatening Rapture's economy or safety, she was just singing pretty songs with the voice god had granted her. Sullivan thought the whole feud between Culpepper and Cohen was just some stupid quest for the limelight, he never expected Ryan to get involved, and he certainly never thought he'd have anything to do with it. But,

But he'd done it. He was the one to wrap his big hands around her skinny little, talented throat and squeeze the air out of it and. And he just left her laying there, naked in the tub, skin aglow and paling in the sickly, blue light. For the first time since his first fatal shot hit home Sullivan walked away from a body shaking, his breath uneven. She may have been outspoken but she didn't deserve to die for it, did she? He thought that with Rapture came freedom, but that doesn't speak of freedom. His knees shook and his legs almost gave way, he knelt in her bedroom, hand on her bed to hold him up as he caught his breath. That's when he saw it. That black and red blanket, real pretty, half finished, now abandoned. It shook him to the core more then the body did, it just didn't seem right, it wasn't right. He ran his fingers on it, it was soft and warm, a bit damp in the moist, Rapture air. He doesn't know what compelled him to take it, but it just didn't seem right to leave it there, it just didn't seem right. 

Sullivan initially thought he would get someone else to finish it, but he couldn't give it away, needed to know where it was. He kept it rolled up at the bottom of his hamper, looking at it made him uneasy and made his stomach churn. He had tried his best to continue her work without any knowledge of knitting. He dropped stitches, and made them too large and janky, the perfect craftsmanship that Culpepper had didn't carry over to the stitches made by Sullivan's big, useless-but-for-terrible-things, ham hands. Now Sullivan loved Rapture, and Sullivan loved Ryan, but holding the blanket he had all but ruined he just couldn't convince himself that any of this was right. 

So he cut off the sections of the blanket he'd ruined and he started asking around for someone to teach him to knit, he had to finish it, he had to make it right. But he didn't know how to knit, and no one would teach him, and the blanket stayed as it was. Sullivan felt a little worse every time he looked at it, he couldn't stand it. He tried to avoid catching the eyes of his reflection in the mirror as he shaved each morning. Then. 

Then Ryan ordered him to start stringing up smugglers in Apollo square, and the lack of righteousness or right-ness in his job made Sullivan just about wretch every time he passed those swinging bodies. He couldn't do it anymore, this just _wasn't right._ He had been with Ryan since he was topside in New York, through thick and thin, so he handed Ryan his badge with shame in his eyes and the familiar aching knot in his chest.

He went to Neptune's Bounty, more home then his home now with all the stake-outs and interrogations he'd had there, and he couldn't face that pretty, black and red blanket laying half-finished on his bed. He had a bottle of whiskey, not good stuff from Sinclair's or McDonagh's, cheap stuff with a smeared label that burned like hellfire on the way down. Shaky fingers wrote out a desperate letter, put it in an envelope addressed to "The Great Man, Andrew Ryan" with an audio diary capturing the words of his missing mistress. Big, guilty hands held a pistol as he laughed a giddy laugh. He hummed a few bars of Rise Rapture Rise, bid adieu to the great man, and 

Well Sullivan didn't know how to knit, and Sullivan didn't know how to live with what he'd done either.

**Author's Note:**

> People need to talk about Sullivan more. I'm writing a lot of bioshock rn so look out for that. I'm on tumblr @barefootcosplayer.


End file.
